The late Maya Angelou was a poetaster, who also dabbled in the writing of essays, songs, and plays. She made her way from sex-worker to professor to world-wide, belovèd po-biz star on little writing talent. She possessed abundant quantities of the gift of gab and the skill to schmooze.
Wearing Many Hats
Critic Helen Razer [1] has said of Maya Angelou’s verse scribblings: “I won’t effectively urge you to critically read her poems, which are almost uniformly shit.” Razer still offered a certain level of praise for Angelou’s social activism.
Maya Angelou’s status as a sacred cow——i.e., one who is undeservedly immune to criticism——prevents most criticism, even the mildest form, from being leveled against this po-biz personality. Such critics often pay the price for criticizing these sacred cows.
Other more generous commentators have dubbed the former “madam” [2] a “renaissance woman” [3] for all of her so-called accomplishments such as poet(aster), essayist, songwriter, playwright, editor, actor, dancer, director, historian, and professor.
Included in Dr. Maya Angelou’s long list of professions is, indeed, the one considered the oldest profession; she worked as both a prostitute and a madam.
In her 1974 memoir, Gather Together in My Name, the former sex worker details her stint in that field of endeavor.
Angelou was also not shy about weighing in on politics: she was a “communist sympathizer” [4] and strong supporter of Cuba’s murdering dictator Fidel Castro.
Joining such luminaries as Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam and the activists seeking release from prison the cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, she supported many radical causes in the name of civil rights.
As Dr. Maya Angelou’s sycophants seek to elevate her as a renaissance women, the more clear-eyed critics realize she was little more than a “jack of all trades, master of none.”
The late poetaster dabbled in the writing of essays, songs, and plays in addition to verse.
After dipping into numerous professions of editor, dancer, director, actor, she was nominated for an Emmy award for her performance in Alex Haley’s Roots.
And she clawed her way from the degrading world of prostitution to become a world-wide, belovèd star, on little talent other than the gift of gab and the penchant for schmooze.
The Bogus Professor
When Dr. Maya Angelou was not traveling and delivering speeches, she occupied the Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University, where she “taught” beginning in 1981.
Hardly qualifying as a “professor,” Angelou taught only one course per semester, and students have reported that she occupied no office on campus.
According to John Meroney’s “The Real Maya Angelou” [5],”The office listed for her in the Wake Forest telephone directory is a storage closet in a building far from the main part of campus.”
Before the site finally eliminated her from its inclusion, her rating on “Rate My Professors” boasted a measly 2.6 on a 5-pont scale.”
One student had commented about the good Dr.’s teaching ability:
Arrogant, spiteful, rude, boring – and possessing a thoroughly mediocre intellect. The only thing that humanizes her is the suspicion that her incessant bullying stems from an awareness of just what a fraud she is. [6]
Star-struck Margaret Feinberg writes a glowing memory of an Angelou class, yet at the same time reveals the poverty of Angelou’s teaching style [7]; the phony professor spent the first three weeks of a semester having the students learn one anothers’ names!
Angelou was awarded numerous honorary doctorates, and she took full advantage of them, even calling herself “Dr.” Maya Angelou, an unearned title. According to Mark Oppenheimer, writer and podcast host,
. . . throughout academia, it is agreed that an honorary doctorate does not entitle one to call oneself “Dr.” The media generally agrees, and a good thing too. [8]
Marguerite Ann Johnson aka “Dr. Maya Angelou” did not earn a doctoral degree. Actually, she never even earned a bachelors or masters degree, having never attended college at all.
Of course, Ms Angelou has the last laugh on her critics regarding her lack of academic acumen: although she occupied no academic office space, she now boasts a residence hall standing in her name: Maya Angelou Hall! [9]
Since 2002, The “Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity” [10] has been studying the “racial and ethnic disparities in health care and health outcomes.”
Also in Angelou’s name was created the “Maya Angelou Presidential Chair” at Wake Forest, currently occupied [11] by race-baiter extremist Melissa Harris-Perry [12].
Sadly, Harris-Perry’s ranting is what currently passes for education in many of today’s universities [13], but on the bright side, note that MSNBC did have the good sense to fire her from her news anchor position.
Other Gigs
Dr. Maya Angelou teamed up with Target and the Poetry Foundation to create a project that introduces children and adults to poetry. The project is called “Dream in Color.”
Few individuals have exploited the color of their skin to the degree that the former Marguerite-Johnson-turned-Maya-Angelou did.
However, it is likely that Angelou’s best gig, the one formidably suited for her level of talent, was her stint with Hallmark Greeting cards [14].
Two samples of the drivel she created for Hallmark: “The wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy, the wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim” and “Life is a glorious banquet, a limitless and delicious buffet.”
A Childhood Trauma
Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Ann Johnson [15] in St. Louis on April 4, 1928. At age seven, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend.
She confided this information only to her brother, but later she learned that one of her uncles had killed the man who raped her.
She claims melodramatically that fearing that her words had killed a man, she refused to speak and did not utter a word until she reached age thirteen.
She periodically lived with her mother and grandmother, who introduced her to literature.
Leaving high school for a short period, she became a cable car conductor in San Francisco. She returned to high school, and then she gave birth to a son a few weeks after graduation.
Although her life was difficult, she never gave up on her interests in the arts, dancing, and writing.
Marguerite Johnson Becomes Maya Angelou
After marrying Tosh Angelos, a Greek sailor, she got a job as a nightclub singer. She changed her name from Marguerite to Maya and altered the Angelos to Angelou and became “Maya Angelou” (pronounced “angelō” not “angeloo.”)
Angelou toured Europe with a production company, studied dance with Martha Graham, and released an album titled Calypso Lady in 1957.
Her interest in writing became strong, and she moved to New York, where she joined a Harlem writing group. She continued acting in off Broadway plays.
Years Abroad
In 1960, Maya Angelou met and married South African civil rights activist Vusumzi Make; the couple relocated to Cairo, Egypt, where Angelou worked as editor of the English language weekly paper The Arab Observer.
After this marriage dissolved, Angelou and her son moved to Ghana, where she worked as a music instructor at the University of Ghana; she also served as an editor at The African Review, while writing for The Ghanaian Times.
Returning to America
After Angelou returned to America in 1964, she began her writing career in earnest, producing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, her first autobiography, which was published in 1970.
This first autobiography gave Angelou national recognition. In all, Angelou penned seven autobiographies.
Angelou also wrote a book of essays titled, Letter to my Daughter, despite the fact that she had no daughters. Angelou’s play Georgia,Georgia was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1972.
Presidential Appointments
President Gerald Ford appointed Maya Angelou to serve on the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission.
For President Jimmy Carter, she served on the Presidential Commission for the International Year of the Woman.
One of Angelou’s most famous pieces is “Phenomenal Woman.” This piece is quite accessible, as are all of her poems.
Angelou’s mystique is in her ability to perform many tasks and perform them well enough to make many people believe she is in fact a phenomenal woman, instead of simply an accomplished borderline grifter.
A Self-Invention: Famous for Being Famous
Angelou has explained that she decided to invent herself because she did not like the inventions that others had invented for her.
She was six feet tall, making her physically imposing. Angelou’s main talent was indeed in making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear——no small feat.
Despite her lack of true talent in any of her chosen fields of dabbling, she managed to gain recognition in many of them.
As some accomplishment-free yet widely celebrated folks like the Kardashians and Zsa Zsa Gabor are famous for being famous, Maya Angelou was noted for being noted.
Angelou did have the ability to make people notice her, but even more sweet for her was her ability to make herself seem accomplished when, in fact, her talent was mediocre at best.
Exposing a Sacred Cow
As a sacred cow of po-biz, Dr. Maya Angelou still benefits from an undeserved status.
Most scholars and critics shy away from pointing out the obvious about Ms. Angelou——that her talent as a writer, especially a poet, was meager at best, totally lacking at worst.
However, there are those brave commentators who ask the question, “Is it time yet to talk honestly about Maya Angelou?,” and then proceed to make that attempt.
Thus, the editor and co-founder at American Thinker Thomas Lifson [16] has begun the honest talk with the following:
There is an important phenomenon in cultural life that the hard left has exploited for many decades.
Most people cannot really tell what good poetry, or painting, or serious theatre (or artsy film, for that matter) is, but they fear looking stupid if they fail to appreciate what others say is good.
So, an “artist” in these semi-esoteric fields who is helped along by a claque of politically sympathetic cheerleaders in academia or journalism can become “widely acclaimed” and, if he or she plays the part well (as Angelou did), even “beloved.”
Still, the fact that Marguerite Johnson could transform her life in such a gigantic, flamboyant manner into the highly successful “Dr. Maya Angelou” on such little poetic talent speaks volumes for the grit and tenacity the woman possessed.
That feat may be something to be begrudgingly admired, even if not emulated.
Misreading the Orpheus and Eurydice Myth: Feminist Ideology and the Corruption of Mythic Meaning
Misunderstanding myth is a widespread phenomenon: the very definition of the term “myth” is trivialized in modern parlance, as anything from an error to a lie is often called a myth. The term myth refers to stories with universal, spiritual appeal to the heart, mind, and soul of humankind.
The current motivation to “correct” the past has become one of the more persistent urges in contemporary literary studies. This tendency is visible in the modern attempts to rewrite classical myth, from which ancient figures are called forth, not to unveil perennial truth but to recite the slogans of contemporary feminist ideology.
The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has suffered significantly from this modernizing impulse in the hands of Margaret Atwood and Carol Ann Duffy. The myth’s spiritual drama—the soul’s yearning for transcendence and the unfortunate failure of faith—has been “corrected” by turning it into a patriarchal battle between man and woman.
Atwood and Duffy
In Atwood’s “Eurydice,” from Interlunar (1984), and Duffy’s “Eurydice,” from The World’s Wife (1999), Eurydice has become a cynical voice for liberation, mocking Orpheus as the stereotype of the egotistical male artist. Duffy’s Eurydice calls the musician/poet “Big O” and accuses him of valuing his own legend above his loved one’s life.
Both Atwood and Duffy applaud Eurydice for slipping through her husband’s grasp as he looks back, disobeying his only command. This understandable failure of Orpheus, which is tragic, is converted into emancipation of his spouse by the simple wave of the feminist wand, levied against the patriarchy.
Yet this politically inspired moral conversion relies upon an act of historical and spiritual blindness. The myth of Orpheus is grounded in the sacred lore, explicating the imagination of antiquity, not to the ideological preoccupations of the current modern social climate.
In its original telling, preserved most completely in Virgil’s Georgics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the mythic narrative of Orpheus and Eurydice is not about the sexes but about the soul.
Orpheus remains the quintessential musician/poet; his music/lyrics seeks to restore harmony between life and death as well as between the physical body and the soul. His foray into the Underworld represents the artist’s very vocation: to recover the lost beauty of the world through creative song.
Disobeying a Spiritual Command
The spiritual command not to glance back symbolizes the command of faith: trust in that which cannot be seen with the human eye. His failure as he looks back is not an claim to dominance but the revelation of human weakness facing the enigma of divine perfection. Eurydice’s vanishing does not symbolize an act of resistance; it reveals the soul’s return to the mystery, from which it had only briefly materialized.
The readings of Atwood and Duffy convert the mythic dimension from human emotional truth into the psychology of victimhood. Their Orpheus is not a mystic but a narcissist; their Eurydice is no symbol of the soul but a sarcastic wife in a contemporary petty quarrel. By revising the myth’s value, they turn the story into social allegory and thereby trivialize what they intend to redeem.
They remake the Underworld into a metaphor for patriarchy, and the danger associated with divine disobedience transforms into a parable of female self-assertion. The result remains not only tone-deaf but spiritually hollow. They have thus allowed their gesture of contemporary moralism to masquerade as mythic revision.
Readers can easily understand the appeal for such ministrations. Contemporary literary culture has come to measures significance by the degree of subversion it can produce. To “provide Eurydice a voice” is to score a moral victory for the supposedly oppressed silences of women in the past.
Yet mythic silence is not oppression; it is reverence. Eurydice’s quietness is the silence of mythic spiritual mystery, not the muteness of oppressive victimhood. To convert sacred stillness to irony is to replace contemplation with complaint.
The ancient poets comprehended well the aspects of life and creativity that their modern revisers ignore. Myth does not express itself with grievance language; instead it speaks in the language of the soul. As Orpheus sings, he does not merely effuse emotion; he reorders cosmic energy.
Orpheus’ songs are capable of charming the stones and the trees, not because they answer grievances, but because they call forth balance and harmony between the human and the divine—as does all art, rightly framed.
A Universal Tragedy
The tragedy of Orpheus’ looking back remains universal, not personal. Every human heart and mind, aspiring to attain perfection—self-realization—is required to face the same frailty of faith. Because of this universal mandate, Orpheus’ failure is our own failure: in our fallen state, we cannot help but glance back to what we love, even as love commands us to trust the unseen.
By the empty social moralizing of the myth and sifting it through modern political ideology, poets including Atwood and Duffy abandon the myth’s sacred resonance to the insipid, spiritually dry idiom of politics. They mischaracterize the myth’s silent universality as erasure and mistake its reverence for oppression.
The irony becomes blatantly clear that their “liberated” Eurydice is not free; she remains bound within the suffocating psychology of the age. Her fake, modern voice, though loud with wit, cannot move beyond self-assertion. She may have been granted parole from Hades, but she now finds herself imprisoned in ideology.
The Myth’s Endurance
Thankfully, what endures, however, is not the Atwoodian-Duffian parody of the myth but the myth itself. The songs of Orpheus continue to waft across the centuries because they sing to the immutable condition of the human soul, which longs for what it has lost and suffers as it fails to secure it.
The modern motivation to correct such myths by turning them into moral parables cannot extinguish the ancient fire of their importance. Such trivialization does remind us how some thinkers, influenced by the contemporary postmodernism of radical feminist ideology, only dimly glimpse that light.
Works Cited
Margaret Atwood. “Eurydice.” Interlunar. Oxford University Press, 1984. Carol Ann Duffy. “Eurydice.” The World’s Wife. Picador, 1999. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by A. D. Melville. Oxford University Press, 1986. Virgil. Georgics. Translated by Peter Fallon. Oxford University Press, 2006.
The Problem of Race: Junk Science, Faulty Metaphor
Scientists have revealed the fallacy of employing race to classify human beings. Still, the metaphor of color remains a strong societal force. Prejudice requires no reason—only willingness to believe despite evidence. Thus the metaphor of color continues to influence human relationships and cheapen the culture.
The Junk Science of Race
Early in the nineteenth century, Samuel Morton, a Philadelphia physician, who was considered an important scientist, formulated the theory of “race” based on his collection of skulls.
Skulls from the collection of Samuel Morton, the father of scientific racism, illustrate his classification of people into five races—which arose, he claimed, from separate acts of creation. From left to right: a black woman and a white man, both American; an indigenous man from Mexico; a Chinese woman; and a Malaysian man. —Photo by Robert Clark, Penn Museum
Measuring the skulls, Morton called his procedure “craniometry” and claimed that this procedure determined that there are five races, and each race represented a different level of intelligence:
Caucasians (white) stood at the top of Morton’s hierarchy
Mongolians (yellow) came second
Southeast Asians next (olive), followed by
American Indians (aka Native Americans) (red) with
Ethiopians (black) bringing up the rear and the lowest level of intelligence.
Morton’s racial classifications along with their intelligence markers that placed whites at the top and blacks at the bottom found favor with promoters of slavery in the United States before the American Civil War (1861-1865).
According to Paul Wolff Mitchell, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, “[Morton’s race theory] had a lot of influence, particularly in the South.”
Morton’s pernicious legacy stemmed from the lack of scientific knowledge at the time regarding human DNA and how physical characteristics are passed on from one generation to the next. Upon Morton’s death in 1851, the Charleston Medical Journal in South Carolina lauded the doctor for “giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race.”
Nearly two centuries later, through the many gains in scientific knowledge, scientists have debunked Morton’s theory, and currently he is considered to be the “father of scientific racism”:
To an uncomfortable degree we still live with Morton’s legacy: Racial distinctions continue to shape our politics, our neighborhoods, and our sense of self. This is the case even though what science actually has to tell us about race is just the opposite of what Morton contended. [1]
The Human Genome
In June 2000, at a groundbreaking announcement ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, scientists Francis Collins and Craig Venter revealed that “the completion of a draft sequence of the human genome” had been accomplished.
The project’s purpose was to aid in understanding the nature of human biology in order to assist public health and medical professionals in preventing and treating diseases. Additionally, on the issue of race, Dr. Venter reported the following:
On that day Venter and Collins emphasized that their work confirmed that human genetic diversity cannot be captured by the concept of race and demonstrated that all humans have genome sequences that are 99.9% identical. …Venter said “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.” [2]
Scientists Call for Race Categories To Be “Phased Out”
Regarding the concept of race, Michael Yudell, professor of public health at Drexel University claims,
It’s a concept we think is too crude to provide useful information, it’s a concept that has social meaning that interferes in the scientific understanding of human genetic diversity and it’s a concept that we are not the first to call upon moving away from. [3]
As Professor Jan Sapp, Biology Department at York University, Toronto, has stated, “Science has exposed the myth of race.”
In his review of two recent books on the issue, Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth, by Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle, and Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture, edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan, Professor Sapp offers the following summary of the two works:
Although biologists and cultural anthropologists long supposed that human races—genetically distinct populations within the same species—have a true existence in nature, many social scientists and geneticists maintain today that there simply is no valid biological basis for the concept. The consensus among Western researchers today is that human races are sociocultural constructs. Still, the concept of human race as an objective biological reality persists in science and in society. It is high time that policy makers, educators and those in the medical-industrial complex rid themselves of the misconception of race as type or as genetic population. (4)
Many contemporary scientists are insisting that “racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity” and are calling for categories on race to be “phased out.” The scientific community, including those associated with the Human Genome Project and other geneticists point out that most of the US population are immigrants from various “homelands.”
Thus, describing groups of people becomes a complex task. And they insist that “race”—that is, grouping folks as Caucasian, Asian or African—is not scientifically useful:
the most immediately obvious characteristic of “race’ is that describing most of us as Caucasian, Asian or African is far too simple. Despite attempts by the US Census Bureau to expand its definitions, the term “race” does not describe most of us with the subtlety and complexity required to capture and appreciate our genetic diversity. Unfortunately, this oversimplification has had many tragic effects.
Thus, these scientists are calling for the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to assemble a group of experts in biology and social science to study the issue and formulate a better concept for addressing the useless racial category that interferes with research in genetics [5].
Ashley Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race
After earning a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University in 1936, widely noted scientist Ashley Montagu studied Australian aboriginal culture and in 1949 founded and chaired the anthropology department at Rutgers University. But Montagu had written and published his seminal work, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, in 1942.
The following excerpt from that work demonstrates Montagu’s reasoning in determining that race is a social construct rather than a scientific fact:
As far as research and observation have been able to prove, the chromosome number of all the human races is the same, and all of the five, seven, or ten races (depending on who we follow) are inter-fertile. The blood of all races is built of the same pattern of agglutinins and antigens, and the appropriate blood type from one race can be transfused into any other without untoward effect. Thus in spite of the questionable physical differences between groups of people, an imposing substrate of similarity underlies these differences.
Montagu’s work was so controversial at the time that academia turned against him, but his ideas have influenced succeeding generations of scientists [6].
Even though “race” remains a strong societal influence, especially for those who have managed to gain financially through identity politics and political correctness, the world of hard science continues to unearth examples of the dangers of relying on race as reality in distinguishing differences between and among human beings.
The Faulty Metaphor of Color
The poetic device “metaphor” is employed mostly by poets in their poems. A metaphor says that one thing is another very different thing for literary effect, for example, Robert Frost’s speaker in his poem “Bereft” describes the activity of leaves with the following metaphor:
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed Blindly struck at my knees and missed.
Frost is metaphorically saying that leaves are a snake. But no human being has ever insisted that “leaves” are the same as “snakes,” yet that is exactly what has happened to the metaphor of color.
Science is demonstrating more and more clearly that there is only one “race”—the human race, and I would like to offer the suggestion that, after the metaphor of color has been correctly interpreted, it becomes obvious that there is only one skin color: brown, ranging from light brown to dark brown.
The various skin “colors”—white, yellow, red, olive, and black—are only exaggerations of the actual shades, hues, and tones of human skin. This exaggeration functions in the current vernacular as a metaphor. Human skin is never literally “white,” “black,” “red,” “olive,” or “yellow.”
From so-called “white Caucasians” to supposedly “black Africans,” the range of skin tones may resemble the color of winter grass to a deep chocolate, but no human being ever appears with skin that can be described literally by the prevailing metaphor of colors.
Skin Color: An Insidious Classification
Possibly influenced by Samual Morton’s 5-race theory, the currentrace count usually stands at three: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid [7]. But identifying members of each of these so-called races becomes impossible, as many scientists have asserted.
The most insidious as well as the most popular quality used in the attempt to classify human beings according to race is skin tone: black, white, yellow, red, olive. Yet, as I suggest, there is not one single individual on this planet whose skin color is literally black, white, yellow, red, or olive.
The skin color of all human beings, that is, members of the only true scientific race—”human race, homo sapiens“— is brown: from light brown, metaphorically called “white” to dark brown, metaphorically called “black.”
And all shades, hues, and tones in between, some of which are metaphorically called “yellow,” “red,” and sometimes “olive.” Even the lightest skin tone is not literally “white,” and the darkest “skin tone” is not literally black.
The Equator and Skin Tone
The closer the individual lives to the Equator the darker the skin tone. This fact is common sense. The stronger the sun’s rays striking the skin, the more melanin is made by the body. Melanin protects the skin from the sun:
Melanin, the skin’s brown pigment, is a natural sunscreen that protects tropical peoples from the many harmful effects of ultraviolet (UV) rays. [8]
Clearly, not all Caucasoids are “white,” that is, light brown; not all Negroids are “black,” that is, dark brown. The Mongoloid skin tone also exhibits a wide range of brown hues—none literally yellow or red.
The metaphor of color has served only to segregate and denigrate groups of people. In time, perhaps science will prevail and the metaphor of color will be interpreted to be what it is, only a metaphor.
Race Often Confused with Religion and Nationality
The terms “race” and “racism” have virtually lost meaning in current parlance [9]. However, “race” refers only to the major three classes: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. But as already noted, these categories of race have been debunked as non-scientific.
“Religion” refers to faith traditions of the five major world religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, [10] along with the various branches that have grown from these major categories.
By recategorizing the followers of Judaism as a “race,” Adolf Hitler and the Nazis exerted their political power to exterminate their own Jewish German citizens. That redefinition and misidentification led directly to the Holocaust [11]. The fact that the Judaic ethnicity was recategorized as a “race”—and widely accepted—offers further evidence of the unreality of the racial concept.
“Nationality” refers to the region of the earth that individuals inhabit, particularly the nation or country. Again, misidentification occurs with such claims as some “whites” are “racist” against Hispanics. But “Hispanic” refers to nationality, not race.
A Hispanic may be of any of the so-called races. The country from which an individuals originate does not dictate their “race.” Both Jews and Hispanics (or Latinos, Latinas) may be of any of the race classes.
A Negroid individual may be Jewish, if Judaism is his religion, for example, the late famous singer/actor Sammy Davis, Jr., was a black man of the Jewish faith. Also any individual will be Hispanic, if he is a native of Spain or Latin America.
The confusion of race with religion and nationality reveals the fact that human classifications, as they currently exist, are inadequate because they are too often inaccurate.
As with the Hitlerian Nazis, those classifications have foisted upon humanity worldwide holocausts [12] and other pogroms [13]. If humanity must classify itself, perhaps it should be on the look out for a better criterion for classification than that of race.
Neo-Racism on the Rise
While racism was on the wane in America, especially after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a new wave of the racist plague has begun to increase, ironically becoming especially pronounced after the election of Barack Obama, America’s first black president [14].
The irony of deteriorating race relations in America after twice electing a black president speaks volumes for the insidiousness of the emphasis placed on race and skin color.
Also, the rise in popularity of race huckster Ibram X. Kendi and the fallacious ideology of critical race theory (CRT) have taken center stage in the identity politics area, turning the racial divide on its head, revising the history of racism with alarming and dangerous falsehoods.
As Christopher Rufo explains, “Kendi is a false prophet — and his religion of ‘antiracism’ is nothing more than a marketing-friendly recapitulation of the academic left’s most pernicious ideas.”
According to Kendi, “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.” Asked to define racism, he opined in a circular and tautological fashion, “a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas” [15].
An important rule of rhetoric is that a term cannot be defined by using the same term; thus, Kendi simply goes on a merry-go-round of word salad employing repeatedly the term he is pretending to define. He feigns a definition of “racism” by essentially saying, “Racism is racism.”
Even as Kendi has revealed himself as a lightweight in the struggle against racism, the result of identity politics taken to extremes with CRT has become the scapegoating of the “white race.”
Instead of arguing for equality for all people, CRT hucksters are demanding the abolishing of “whiteness” [16], including the goal of terminating “white” people [17], just as the Nazis attempted to wipe out the Jews.
As the so-called “white race” now becomes the target for denigration, segregation, and ultimate elimination, the unfortunate fact remains that human beings are still in the misguided process of judging, hating, and killing one another because of the misuse of a metaphor.
Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the American People”: Revisiting Hyperbolic Propaganda
After the heinous Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2024, a number of young people seemed to become enthralled with the bin Laden letter, gushing their support on TikTok. The Guardian then removed the letter that had been on their website for two decades.
Opining that the letter should be read and not censored, I decided to capture it and display it here. Following the letter itself, I have placed two videos examining the issue of a number of young people, who seemed to want to side with the terrorist over their own country’s values.
I am, therefore, offering the full transcript of the letter, allegedly written by the late terrorist Osama bin Laden. He claims that he wished to explain to the American people why he decided to kill a large number of them on September 11, 2001.
The propagandistic nature of this piece is on full display, as well as the false notions that pepper the misunderstanding of history spewed by bin Laden and his ilk. It should be remembered that this deluded mass murderer’s “victory” was forfeited through his violent death, as described on the History website:
Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, is killed by U.S. forces during a raid on his compound hideout in Pakistan. The notorious, 54-year-old leader of Al Qaeda, the terrorist network of Islamic extremists, had been the target of a nearly decade-long international manhunt.
The raid began around 1 a.m. local time (4 p.m. EST on May 1, 2011 in the United States), when 23 U.S. Navy SEALs in two Black Hawk helicopters descended on the compound in Abbottabad, a tourist and military center north of Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. One of the helicopters crash-landed into the compound but no one aboard was hurt.
During the raid, which lasted approximately 40 minutes, five people, including bin Laden and one of his adult sons, were killed by U.S. gunfire. No Americans were injured in the assault. Afterward, bin Laden’s body was flown by helicopter to Afghanistan for official identification, then buried at an undisclosed location in the Arabian Sea less than 24 hours after his death, in accordance with Islamic practice.
Terrorist bin Laden begins his diatribe with the widespread revisionist version of the history of “Palestine.” For an accurate discussion of that history, please see Jerrold L. Sobel’s “There Was Never a Country Called Palestine.”
Reading of the Letter:
Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the American People”
The full transcript of the letter ibegins here:
November 24, 2002
In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful,
“Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is Able to give them (believers) victory.” [Quran 22:39]
“Those who believe, fight in the Cause of Allah, and those who disbelieve, fight in the cause of Taghut (anything worshipped other than Allah e.g. Satan). So fight you against the friends of Satan; ever feeble is indeed the plot of Satan.”[Quran 4:76]
Some American writers have published articles under the title ‘On what basis are we fighting?’. These articles have generated a number of responses, some of which adhered to the truth and were based on Islamic Law, and others which have not. Here we wanted to outline the truth – as an explanation and warning – hoping for Allah’s reward, seeking success and support from Him.
While seeking Allah’s help, we form our reply based on two questions directed at the Americans:
(Q1) Why are we fighting and opposing you?
(Q2) What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?
As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:
(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.
a) You attacked us in Palestine:
(i) Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation. The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its*price, and pay for it heavily.
(ii) It brings us both laughter and tears to see that you have not yet tired of repeating your fabricated lies that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine, as it was promised to them in the Torah. Anyone who disputes with them on this alleged fact is accused of anti-semitism. This is one of the most fallacious, widely-circulated fabrications in history. The people of Palestine are pure Arabs and original Semites. It is the Muslims who are the inheritors of Moses (peace be upon him) and the inheritors of the real Torah that has not been changed. Muslims believe in all of the Prophets, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon them all. If the followers of Moses have been promised a right to Palestine in the Torah, then the Muslims are the most worthy nation of this.
When the Muslims conquered Palestine and drove out the Romans, Palestine and Jerusalem returned to Islam, the religion of all the Prophets peace be upon them. Therefore, the call to a historical right to Palestine cannot be raised against the Islamic Ummah that believes in all the Prophets of Allah (peace and blessings be upon them) – and we make no distinction between them.
(iii) The blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenged. You must know that the Palestinians do not cry alone; their women are not widowed alone; their sons are not orphaned alone.
(b) You attacked us in Somalia; you supported the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon.
(c) Under your supervision, consent and orders, the governments of our countries which act as your agents, attack us on a daily basis;
These governments prevent our people from establishing the Islamic Shariah, using violence and lies to do so.(
These governments give us a taste of humiliation, and place us in a large prison of fear and subdual.
(iii) These governments steal our Ummah’s wealth and sell them to you at a paltry price.
(iv) These governments have surrendered to the Jews, and handed them most of Palestine, acknowledging the existence of their state over the dismembered limbs of their own people.
(v) The removal of these governments is an obligation upon us, and a necessary step to free the Ummah, to make the Shariah the supreme law and to regain Palestine. And our fight against these governments is not separate from our fight against you.
(d) You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.
(e) Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities, to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.
(f) You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern. Yet when 3000 of your people died, the entire world rises and has not yet sat down.
(g) You have supported the Jews in their idea that Jerusalem is their eternal capital, and agreed to move your embassy there. With your help and under your protection, the Israelis are planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque. Under the protection of your weapons, Sharon entered the Al-Aqsa mosque, to pollute it as a preparation to capture and destroy it.
(2) These tragedies and calamities are only a few examples of your oppression and aggression against us. It is commanded by our religion and intellect that the oppressed have a right to return the aggression. Do not await anything from us but Jihad, resistance and revenge. Is it in any way rational to expect that after America has attacked us for more than half a century, that we will then leave her to live in security and peace?!!
(3) You may then dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against civilians, for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake:
(a) This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom, and its leaders in this world. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.
(b) The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq. These tax dollars are given to Israel for it to continue to attack us and penetrate our lands. So the American people are the ones who fund the attacks against us, and they are the ones who oversee the expenditure of these monies in the way they wish, through their elected candidates.
(c) Also the American army is part of the American people. It is these very same people who are shamelessly helping the Jews fight against us.
(d) The American people are the ones who employ both their men and their women in the American Forces which attack us.
(e) This is why the American people cannot be not innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us.
(f) Allah, the Almighty, legislated the permission and the option to take revenge. Thus, if we are attacked, then we have the right to attack back. Whoever has destroyed our villages and towns, then we have the right to destroy their villages and towns. Whoever has stolen or wealth, then we have the right to destroy their economy. And whoever has killed our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs.
The American Government and press still refuses to answer the question:
Why did they attack us in New York and Washington?
If Sharon is a man of peace in the eyes of Bush, then we are also men of peace!!! America does not understand the language of manners and principles, so we are addressing it using the language it understands.
(Q2) As for the second question that we want to answer: What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?
(1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.
(a) The religion of the Unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Islam is the religion of all the prophets, and makes no distinction between them – peace be upon them all.
It is to this religion that we call you; the seal of all the previous religions. It is the religion of Unification of God, sincerity, the best of manners, righteousness, mercy, honor, purity, and piety. It is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and the persecuted. It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the hand, tongue and heart. It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah’s Word and religion reign Supreme. And it is the religion of unity and agreement on the obedience to Allah, and total equality between all people, without regarding their color, sex, or language.
b) It is the religion whose book – the Quran – will remain preserved and unchanged, after the other Divine books and messages have been changed. The Quran is the miracle until the Day of Judgment. Allah has challenged anyone to bring a book like the Quran or even ten verses like it.
(2) The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.
(a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honor, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling’s, and trading with interest.
We call you to all of this that you may be freed from that which you have become caught up in; that you may be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation, that your leaders spread amongst you to conceal from you the despicable state to which you have reached.
(b) It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind:
(i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the lord and your Creator. You flee from the embarrassing question posed to you: How is it possible for Allah the Almighty to create His creation, grant them power over all the creatures and land, grant them all the amenities of life, and then deny them that which they are most in need of: knowledge of the laws which govern their lives?
(ii) You are the nation that permits Usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions. Yet you build your economy and investments on Usury. As a result of this, in all its different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense; precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against.
(iii) You are a nation that permits the production, trading and usage of intoxicants. You also permit drugs, and only forbid the trade of them, even though your nation is the largest consumer of them.
(iv) You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object.
Who can forget your President Clinton’s immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he ‘made a mistake’, after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?
(v) You are a nation that permits gambling in its all forms. The companies practice this as well, resulting in the investments becoming active and the criminals becoming rich.
(vi) You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools calling upon customers to purchase them. You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins. You then rant that you support the liberation of women.
(vii) You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly. Giant corporations and establishments are established on this, under the name of art, entertainment, tourism and freedom, and other deceptive names you attribute to it.
(viii) and because of all this, you have been described in history as a nation that spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past. Go ahead and boast to the nations of man, that you brought them AIDS as a Satanic American Invention.
(xi) You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.
(x) Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts. Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy.
(xi) That which you are singled out for in the history of mankind, is that you have used your force to destroy mankind more than any other nation in history; not to defend principles and values, but to hasten to secure your interests and profits. You who dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, even though Japan was ready to negotiate an end to the war. How many acts of oppression, tyranny and injustice have you carried out, O callers to freedom?
(xii) Let us not forget one of your major characteristics: your duality in both manners and values; your hypocrisy in manners and principles. All*manners, principles and values have two scales: one for you and one for the others.
(a) The freedom and democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for white race only; as for the rest of the world, you impose upon them your monstrous, destructive policies and Governments, which you call the ‘American friends’. Yet you prevent them from establishing democracies. When the Islamic party in Algeria wanted to practice democracy and they won the election, you unleashed your agents in the Algerian army onto them, and to attack them with tanks and guns, to imprison them and torture them – a new lesson from the ‘American book of democracy’!!!
(b) Your policy on prohibiting and forcibly removing weapons of mass destruction to ensure world peace: it only applies to those countries which you do not permit to possess such weapons. As for the countries you consent to, such as Israel, then they are allowed to keep and use such weapons to defend their security. Anyone else who you suspect might be manufacturing or keeping these kinds of weapons, you call them criminals and you take military action against them.
(c) You are the last ones to respect the resolutions and policies of International Law, yet you claim to want to selectively punish anyone else who does the same. Israel has for more than 50 years been pushing UN resolutions and rules against the wall with the full support of America.
(d) As for the war criminals which you censure and form criminal courts for – you shamelessly ask that your own are granted immunity!! However, history will not forget the war crimes that you committed against the Muslims and the rest of the world; those you have killed in Japan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon and Iraq will remain a shame that you will never be able to escape. It will suffice to remind you of your latest war crimes in Afghanistan, in which densely populated innocent civilian villages were destroyed, bombs were dropped on mosques causing the roof of the mosque to come crashing down on the heads of the Muslims praying inside. You are the ones who broke the agreement with the Mujahideen when they left Qunduz, bombing them in Jangi fort, and killing more than 1,000 of your prisoners through suffocation and thirst. Allah alone knows how many people have died by torture at the hands of you and your agents. Your planes remain in the Afghan skies, looking for anyone remotely suspicious.
(e) You have claimed to be the vanguards of Human Rights, and your Ministry of Foreign affairs issues annual reports containing statistics of those countries that violate any Human Rights. However, all these things vanished when the Mujahideen hit you, and you then implemented the methods of the same documented governments that you used to curse. In America, you captured thousands of Muslims and Arabs, took them into custody with neither reason, court trial, nor even disclosing their names. You issued newer, harsher laws.
What happens in Guantanamo is a historical embarrassment to America and its values, and it screams into your faces – you hypocrites, “What is the value of your signature on any agreement or treaty?”
(3) What we call you to thirdly is to take an honest stance with yourselves – and I doubt you will do so to discover that you are a nation without principles or manners, and that the values and principles to you are something which you merely demand from others, not that which yourself must adhere to.
(4) We also advise you to stop supporting Israel, and to end your support of the Indians in Kashmir, the Russians against the Chechens and to also cease supporting the Manila Government against the Muslims in Southern Philippines.
(5) We also advise you to pack your luggage and get out of our lands. We desire for your goodness, guidance, and righteousness, so do not force us to send you back as cargo in coffins.
(6) Sixthly, we call upon you to end your support of the corrupt leaders in our countries. Do not interfere in our politics and method of education. Leave us alone, or else expect us in New York and Washington.
(7) We also call you to deal with us and interact with us on the basis of mutual interests and benefits, rather than the policies of sub dual, theft and occupation, and not to continue your policy of supporting the Jews because this will result in more disasters for you.
If you fail to respond to all these conditions, then prepare for fight with the Islamic Nation. The Nation of Monotheism, that puts complete trust on Allah and fears none other than Him. The Nation which is addressed by its Quran with the words: “Do you fear them? Allah has more right that you should fear Him if you are believers. Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of believing people. And remove the anger of their (believers’) hearts. Allah accepts the repentance of whom He wills. Allah is All-Knowing, All-Wise.” [Quran 9:13-1]
The Nation of honor and respect: “But honour, power and glory belong to Allah, and to His Messenger (Muhammad- peace be upon him) and to the believers.” [Quran 63:8]
“So do not become weak (against your enemy), nor be sad, and you will be*superior (in victory )if you are indeed (true) believers” [Quran 3:139]
The Nation of Martyrdom; the Nation that desires death more than you desire life:
“Think not of those who are killed in the way of Allah as dead. Nay, they are alive with their Lord, and they are being provided for. They rejoice in what Allah has bestowed upon them from His bounty and rejoice for the sake of those who have not yet joined them, but are left behind (not yet martyred) that on them no fear shall come, nor shall they grieve. They rejoice in a grace and a bounty from Allah, and that Allah will not waste the reward of the believers.” [Quran 3:169-171]
The Nation of victory and success that Allah has promised: “It is He Who has sent His Messenger (Muhammad peace be upon him) with guidance and the religion of truth (Islam), to make it victorious over all other religions even though the Polytheists hate it.” [Quran 61:9]
“Allah has decreed that “Verily it is I and My Messengers who shall be victorious, All-Powerful, All-Mighty.” [Quran 58:21]
The Islamic Nation that was able to dismiss and destroy the previous evil Empires like yourself; the Nation that rejects your attacks, wishes to remove your evils, and is prepared to fight you. You are well aware that the Islamic Nation, from the very core of its soul, despises your haughtiness and arrogance.
If the Americans refuse to listen to our advice and the goodness, guidance and righteousness that we call them to, then be aware that you will lose this Crusade Bush began, just like the other previous Crusades in which you were humiliated by the hands of the Mujahideen, fleeing to your home in great silence and disgrace. If the Americans do not respond, then their fate will be that of the Soviets who fled from Afghanistan to deal with their military defeat, political breakup, ideological downfall, and economic bankruptcy.
This is our message to the Americans, as an answer to theirs. Do they now know why we fight them and over which form of ignorance, by the permission of Allah, we shall be victorious?
🕉
After the heinous Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2024, a number of young people seemed to become enthralled with the bin Laden letter, gushing their support on TikTok. The following two videos examine that phenomenon:
Refuting the Big Lie That the “Three/Fifths Compromise” Enshrined Slavery in the U. S. Constitution
The “Three/Fifths Compromise 1787” permitted the Southern slave states to count 60% of their slave population for representation—even though slaves were property, not citizens. That compromise did not state—or even imply—that each slave was only “three/fifths of a person.”
Representation, Not Percentage of Personhood
The delegates to the Constitutional Convention [1] met in Philadelphia from May 25 to September 17, 1787, for the purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.
That document had proven too weak to address the issues that the newly formed nation was facing. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison had believed that revising the Articles was impossible and that a complete overhaul was necessary.
Thus, the members of the Constitutional Convention scrapped the Articles of Confederation in favor of composing a new document, which, of course, resulted in the Constitution, under which the U.S. has been governed since its ratification.
The convention members were confronted with two problems as they were creating the sections regarding representation in the House of Representatives and the Senate. States with small populations demanded that each state have equal representation, while large states demanded that representation be based of population. The respective demands would guarantee a desired advantage for each state.
The Constitutional conveners thus solved that problem by allowing the upper house to have 2 senators, while the lower house would have a number of representatives based on population.
However, after this fix of representation, a second issue arose: slave states demanded that slaves be counted for purposes of representation, even though slaves would not be afforded the right to vote or otherwise participate in citizenship.
Free states insisted that no slaves be counted because counting non-participating individuals would give the slave states an unfair advantage. That advantage would mean that abolishing slavery would be next to impossible. In effect, if slaves were counted for purposes of representation, that slave count would help perpetuate slavery.
Slaves Were Not Voting Citizens
Slaves possessed no rights of citizenship [2]: they could not vote, run for office, or participate in any civic discussion. Slaves were not citizens; they were property [3] in a similar sense that cattle and cotton were property.
Slave were not even allowed to learn how to read; they were kept illiterate and uneducated in order to keep them subservient. Keeping slaves as property was a priority in the slave states. And by counting slaves, their population would overpower the free states who would seek the end of slavery.
While far from being a perfect solution, the “Three/Fifths Compromise” settled the issue of counting the slave populace: instead of counting the entire population of slaves, it allowed slave states to count three/fifths of that total number for the purpose of representation.
Nowhere in that Compromise or in the Constitution does it state or even imply that each slave is only three/fifths of a person. The sole purpose of the compromise was to determine representation in the House of Representatives, not the percentage of personhood each individual slave possessed.
The slave states demanded full counting of slaves, while the free states demanded that none of the slave population count, because slaves were not citizens.
Following the logic that the “Three/Fifths Compromise” deemed each slave three/fifths of a human, the slave owners were insisting that their slaves were fully human. The free states, who later worked to abolish slavery, were implying that slaves had no personhood at all: Both of those propositions are patently absurd and opposite of the intentions of the slave and free states.
The slave states wanted it both ways essentially: for the purpose of representation, they wanted slaves to be counted as citizens, but in every other capacity, they wanted slaves to remains non-citizens or mere property.
The following excerpt, Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3, from the Constitution [4] shows clearly that the “Three/Fifths Compromise” does not refer to the individual personhood of each slave:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Number of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. (emphasis added)
The “three fifths of all other Persons” designates the slave population and any other groups not specifically names; it does not designate that the personhood of each person in those groups is only three/fifths that of a free, tax-paying citizen.
The terms “Negroes,” “black,” “slaves,” and “slavery” do not appear in “Three/Fifths Compromise” of the U.S. Constitution.
The term “slavery” appears in the Thirteenth Amendment to “enshrine” the abolition of that evil institution. The term “slave” appears in the Fourteenth Amendment in the phrase “emancipation of any slave.”
The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed that the former slave-holders could not petition the government for reparations for losing their slaves. Thus, those amendments, added in 1865, were not in place when Frederick Douglass [5], the foremost black abolitionist in the 1840s remarked,
If the Constitution were intended to be by its framers and adopters a slave-holding instrument, then why would neither “slavery,” “slave-holding,” nor “slave” be anywhere found in it?
Image 2: Frederick Douglass Portrait by Greg Groesch/The Washington Times
First Step to the Abolition of Slavery
The founders [6] of the United States of America and framers of the Constitution were well aware of the travesty of slavery and well understood that that institution could not endure, despite the fact that some of them owned plantations supported by slave labor.
However, as it is with most deeply ingrained cultural traditions, that evil societal feature could not be mandated in a document that was needed to help govern the young country.
Possibly, if the free states had insisted that the slave states not count any of their slave population, it would have been impossible to frame the new governing document.
Also possible was the eruption of warring factions that might have resulted in an earlier civil war. Those two eventualities were avoided through the “Three/Fifths Compromise.”
In order to assure that the southern slaves states accept the new document, the framers had to make the concession of allowing those states to count part of their slave population. But that concession can be viewed as the first step toward eradicating slavery from the country. It allowed the Constitution to become the governing document of the young nation.
By the strength of that document’s tenets, the nation was able to end the institution of slavey while remaining unified, after suffering the bloody Civil War that did occur from 1861 to 1865.
The great Founding Father, Frederick Douglass, who worked to abolish slavery understood that the ideals and words of those earlier statesmen had laid the groundwork to eliminate that evil institution. Douglass averred [7],
Notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably, work the downfall of slavery . . .
Discerning historians, looking back with an open mind, have determined that certain compromises such as the “Three/Fifths Compromise 1787” have, in fact, functioned for “the downfall of slavery.”
The Three/Fifths Big Lie Persists
False notions known as big lies, have staying power because they have been loudly repeated by the perpetrators until they become ingrained in the culture. Even though the phrase, “the big lie” [8], was popularized by Adolf Hitler [9] and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, American statist politicians have never been immune to employing that concept to smear their opponents.
The “Three/Fifths Compromise 1787” has been widely misrepresented as enshrining slavery in the U. S. Constitution, deeming that a slave was only three/fifths of a person. However, nowhere in the United States Constitution does the text state or even imply that the personhood of each black individual is only “three/fifths of a person.”
That persistent falsehood has been debunked repeatedly, yet it remains part of a popular mythology. The institution of slavery and the decades of Jim Crow Laws and Black Codes remain permanent stains on the history of the United States.
And those issues need to be addressed, explained, and understood, but what Americans do not need is for political operatives to falsify that history to make it more heinous than it was.
The falsehood that blacks were once considered three/fifths of a person needs to be addressed and refuted whenever and wherever it resurfaces. As Malik Simba from BlackPast.org explains,
Often misinterpreted to mean that African Americans as individuals are considered three-fifths of a person or that they are three-fifths of a citizen of the U.S., the three-fifths clause (Article I, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution of 1787) in fact declared that for purposes of representation in Congress, enslaved blacks in a state would be counted as three-fifths of the number of white inhabitants of that state. [10]
Despite the many explanations and corrections from historians and other Constitutional experts [11], which are widely available online, the false claim that blacks were considered to be only “three/fifths a person” continues to appear regularly.
Some critics assert that the U.S. Constitution enshrined slavery [12] with the “Three/Fifths Compromise of 1787,” and others make the inaccurate statement that blacks in the U.S. were thought to be three/fifths of a person at one point in history.
Two particularly egregious examples of this “big lie” come from two high level, otherwise knowledgeable government officials: Condoleezza Rice [13], 66th Secretary of State and General Mark Milley [14], 20th chairman of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Secretary Rice, in speeches abroad has claimed [15], “In the original U.S. Constitution, I was only three-fifths of a person.” And General Mark Milley, refers to that falsehood, as he mistakes the fraction as “three/fourths” [16] instead of “three/fifths.”
These misstatements by such accomplished and knowledgeable individuals demonstrate how widespread and deep some errors have been carved into the culture. It is past time to discard this “big lie” along with other false notion [17] that the Democratic and Republican Parties switched sides on race.
The accurate teaching of history must become a valued part of education if America is to remain free and prosperous.
Debunking the Big Lie That Democrats and Republicans Switched Sides on Race
Republican failure to refute Democrats’ “big lie” that their parties switched sides on race has allowed that falsehood to spread. Republicans need to refute the Democrats’ lie to reclaim for their Party its history in fighting slavery and racism. The GOP has always been the party of Civil Rights.
The Big Lie and American Politics
The phrase “the big lie” [1] was popularized by Adolf Hitler [2] and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. The primary purpose of the big lie technique as employed by Hitler and the Nazis was to turn German citizens against the Jews.
The technique worked so well that the Holocaust, resulting in the deaths of upward of eleven million people, including at least six million Jews, became a stain on humanity and a historical reference point.
Unfortunately, American politics has never become immune to the diseased concept of the big lie.
Numerous fabrications have flourished and influenced in heinous ways the relationship between various identities groups that make up the United States of America.
Debunking a Pernicious Myth
One of the biggest of the big lies in American politics is that the two major political parties, Democratic and Republican, switched sides on the issue of race. In Dan O’Donnell’s “The Myth of the Republican-Democrat ‘Switch’,” the writer offers a useful introduction to the issue:
When faced with the sobering reality that Democrats supported slavery, started the Civil War when the abolitionist Republican Party won the Presidency, established the Ku Klux Klan to brutalize newly freed slaves and keep them from voting, opposed the Civil Rights Movement, modern-day liberals reflexively perpetuate the rather pernicious myth—that the racist southern Democrats of the 1950s and 1960s became Republicans, leading to the so-called “switch” of the parties. This is as ridiculous as it is easily debunked. [3]
Because the Republican Party was founded to abolish slavery and has always been the party of Civil Rights—including the struggle for women’s suffrage—in the U.S.A, the Democratic Party seized the issue, turning racism into a Republican problem by claiming that the parties switched sides of race.
The big lie of the parties switching sides on race, however, is not the only falsehood that litters the political landscape. Various factions have filled historical reportage with inaccurate claims that persist; for example, a 2015 Washington Post headline blares, “We used to count black Americans as 3/5 of a person” [4].
Political ideologues and agenda-driven academics often claim that in establishing the Constitution, the Founding Fathers thought that blacks were only three/fifths human because of the three-fifths compromise; however, the “Three/Fifths Compromise” focused on representation to congress not on the humanity of each person.
Even Condoleezza Rice [5], an educated, accomplished former secretary of state, fell for this lie: “In the original U.S. Constitution, I was only three-fifths of a person.” Such a misstatement by a sophisticated and knowledgeable person just shows how widespread and deep some errors have been carved into the culture.
Then there is the false assertion that “Nazis” are right wing. The term “Nazi” is short for National Socialist German Worker Party, translation from the German, “Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.”
The political right has never endorsed “socialism.” Along with “fascism,” the term by definition includes statism or government control of the lives of citizens—the antithesis of the political right’s stance.
Confronting an Inconvenient Past
When confronted with the inconvenient history of their party regarding the issue of race, the American Democratic Party members and its sycophants insist that the Republican and Democratic Parties simply switched positions on race, after the Republicans had ushered in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This ludicrous claim can easily be laid to rest with a few pertinent facts.
On January 1, 1863, Republican President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which stated “that all persons held as slaves are, and henceforward shall be free.”
The country had already been suffering two years of a bloody Civi War to end slavery. Democrats had been lobbying for and passing legislation such as the Jim Crow laws and Black Codes for over a century—all designed to keep the black population from enjoying the fruits of citizenship.
President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, signed the Civil Right Act of 1964 in to law; however, Johnson himself had labored tirelessly against earlier civil rights legislation.
By signing that bill, Johnson merely demonstrated that he had come to understand that the way for Democrats to acquire and maintain power in future was to pacify and humor blacks, instead of denigrating them and segregating them from whites as the Democrats had always done in the past.
Allegedly, Johnson had quipped, “I’ll have those ni**ers voting Democrat for the next 200 years.” That infamous statement clearly reveals where Johnson’s loyalties lay: with acquiring power for the Democratic Party and not for recognizing African Americans as citizens. Endeavoring to deconstruct Johnson’s racist position, David Emery at snopes.com labels the claim regarding Johnson’s remark “unproven” [6].
But then as he continues his biased analysis, Emery reveals other suggestions that make it clear that Johnson’s beliefs rendered him the consummate racist. For example, Emery offers the report, in which according to Doris Kearns Godwin, Johnson quipped,
These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. (my emphasis)
After continued biased bloviating, David Emery admits, “Circling back to the quote with which we started, it wouldn’t have been entirely out of character for LBJ to have said something like, ‘I’ll have those ni**ers voting Democratic (sic) for 200 years’”; however, Emery doubts it, of course.
House and Senate Vote Tally for the Civil Rights Act 1964
The following is a breakdown of the voting tally in the House and Senate [7] for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 of members voting for the bill:
Democrats: House 153 out of 253 = approx. 60% Republicans: House 136 out of 178 = approx. 80% Democrats: Senate 46 out of 67 = 69% Republicans: Senate 27 out of 33 = 82%
While about 80% of the Republicans in the House of Representatives voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, only about 60% of the Democrats voted aye. Also while in the Senate, 82% percent of Republicans voted for the bill, only 69% of Democrats did.
Attempting to Rehabilitate by Geography
In order to try to rehabilitate the Democrats’ negative voting record on civil rights, Democrat apologists point out that when one accounts for geographical positioning [8] of the members of the house and senate, the voting tallies this way:
Southern Democrats: 1–20 (5%–95%) (Ralph Yarborough of Texas voted yea) Southern Republicans: 0–1 (0%–100%) (John Tower of Texas voted nay)
Northern Democrats: 45–1 (98%–2%) (Robert Byrd of West Virginia voted nay) Northern Republicans: 27–5 (84%–16%)
This set of votes shows that no southern senate Republicans voted for the act, but there was only one southern Republican in the senate at the time. And also no house Republican voted for the act, but again there were only ten southern Republicans in the house.
This low number of Republicans in the house and senate when converted to percentages skews the reality of the fact that the overall vote, which is the vote that counts, clearly outs the Democrats as opposers of the act. And the Democrats’ main reason for voting against the act was based on race, especially in the south.
However, all of the Republican senators, both north and south, who voted against the act, did so because they favored Senator Barry Goldwater’s position, who remained against the act, not because of racial animus but because of his belief that it was unconstitutional in usurping states’ rights, especially in the area of private business.
The Republican Party was founded, primarily in order to abolish slavery. Yet over a century later, modern-day Democrats such as former house member, Charlie Rangel, continue to spread the big lie that the Republican and Democratic parties simply “changed sides” in the 1960s on civil rights issues.
That excuse is widely exercised by Democrats when confronted with their own undeniably racist past [9]. However, the facts do not support but rather reveal that claim as a big lie.
Three Misrepresented Issues
The persistent inaccuracy that the two parties switched sides is partially based on three significant issues that have been misrepresented by Democrats and their sycophants in the mainstream media:
1.Barry Goldwater’s position regarding the Civil Right Act of 1964. Goldwater [10] did oppose that bill in its final form because he argued that it was unconstitutional, in that it usurped state and individual rights. Goldwater had helped found Arizona’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and he had voted for earlier versions of civil rights legislation.
Thus, Goldwater’s opposition was not similar to the Democrats’ opposition based on racism; Goldwater’s opposition was based on his interpretation of the Constitution.
2.The Southern Strategy. With this strategy [11], the Republican Party was attempting to demonstrate to southern Democrats that by continuing to vote for racist/socialist Democrats they were voting against their own economic interests.
What gave Democrats the opening to use this strategy against Republicans was that the Republicans utilized racist political bigots, who were, in fact, Democrats themselves, to help win votes for Republicans.
This strategy prompted the GOP opponents to misrepresent the Republican’s purpose and thus label it primarily racist, when it was, in fact, based on economic growth, not racism.
3. The American South turning to Red from Blue. This claim falls apart with the fact that the “Deep South”—Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana—took 30 years to begin changing from Democrat to Republican.
It was only in the peripheral South—Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas—that many working-class transplants, relocating from the northern states as well as from other parts of the United States, understood that the Republican Party offered policies that promoted business, commerce, and entrepreneurial success.
Those transplants, after all, had relocated south to improve their financial status through their new jobs. Gerard Alexander explains in his review:
The myth that links the GOP with racism leads us to expect that the GOP should have advanced first and most strongly where and when the politics of white solidarity were most intense.
The GOP should have entrenched itself first among Deep South whites and only later in the Periphery. The GOP should have appealed at least as much, if not more, therefore, to the less educated, working-class whites who were not its natural voters elsewhere in the country but who were George Wallace’s base.[12]
If the myth of the switched sides were accurate, the Republican Party would have taken hold more strongly first among the traditional racists—that is, the older voters would have become Republicans before the younger ones and the transplants. But that did not happen, because the Republican Party attracted those who were “upwardly mobile” and “non-union.”
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racism in the country’s history had begun to wane as a social and political force. But the Democratic Party continued to foment unrest between the races in order to employ racism as an issue against their opponents in the Republican Party. That tactic is still in place.
After the election of 2020, under the Democratic administration of Joe Biden, the racial unrest began to escalate further with the ideas touted by proponents of Critical Race Theory [13] and the insistence that white supremacy [14] remains the country’s greatest threat.
Poverty Producing Policies
The main reason that the Democratic Party concocted the idea that the parties simply switched positions was to gain power. Reverend Wayne Perryman explains:
Many believed the Democrats had a change of heart and fell in love with blacks. To the contrary, history reveals the Democrats didn’t fall in love with black folks, they fell in love with the black vote knowing this would be their ticket into the White House.[15]
Economist Thomas Sowell [16] has also shed light on the subject: “some of the most devastating policies, in terms of their actual effects on black people, have come from liberal Democrats.”
Sowell emphasizes that the “minimum wage laws” everywhere they have been established have a “track record of increasing unemployment, especially among the young, the less skilled and minorities.”
According to historian Sam Jacobs [17], the 1960s Great Society and War on Poverty, the programs established by the Johnson administration, brought about conditions, which furthered the rise of poverty among black families.
By discouraging marriage, these policies have resulted in out-of-wedlock birthrates that have skyrocketed, “among all demographic groups in the U.S., but most notably African Americans.”
The U.S. out-of-wedlock birthrate in the 1960s hovered around 3% for whites and close to 8% for all Americans; that rate was around 25% for blacks. But, by the mid 1970s, those rates had increased to 10% for whites, 25% for all Americans, and over 50% for blacks.
Then by late 1980s, the birth-rate of unmarried black women had become greater than for married black women. In 2013, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for blacks had climbed to almost 75%.
The Census Bureau [18] maintains that poverty is closely associated with out-of-wedlock births. By instituting a system that keeps blacks at a disadvantage, the Democrats have a captive audience to which they pander for votes.
The Democratic Party stations itself as the protector of blacks and other minorities, not with policies that assist those demographics but with policies that keep them dependent on government.
Unfair Race Policies Unsystematized
Despite the revisionist history and unsupportable claims of the CRT and white supremacy advocates, there is no argument that can refute the fact that racism as an issue of public policy has been unsystematized since the passage of the civil rights acts of the 1960s. No more Jim Crow laws or Black Codes anywhere call for racial discrimination as they had done before the passage of those civil right laws.
Before the passage of those acts, not only did racist laws exist, they were enforced by legal authorities as well as the Ku Klux Klan, which, according the North Carolina historian Allen W. Trelease [19] in his book, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, “The Klan became in effect a terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.”
And Eric Foner [20], Columbia University historian, in his study, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863–1877, has averred that the KKK was “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.”
Still, statist historians such as Carole Emberton, an associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo, continue to employ the “party lines of the 1860s/1870s are not the party lines of today” [21] bromide attempting to separate the Democratic Party’s engagement from the Ku Klux Klan.
Yet in the same breath, Emberton admits, “that various ‘Klans’ that sprung up around the South acted as a ‘strong arm’ for many local Democratic politicians during Reconstruction.”
Democrats continue to employ the often debunked claim that racism is still a “systemic” problem. They offer this prevarication so they can insist that only the Democratic Party is willing to fight against that “systemic” blight on society.
But again and again, the Democratic Party’s policies have been used, as Lyndon Johnson used them, to placate blacks by making them think they are getting something that no political party even has the power to give: financial security and equality with guaranteed outcomes.
Political parties, when in power, can help the voting public only by instituting policies that encourage financial success and individual freedom. They cannot guarantee that success. They cannot legislate individual success through identity politics.
Strategy to Gain Power
The Democratic Party and its allies continue to employ the big lie that the two parties exchanged positions on race, in an attempt to gain power and to rehabilitate the party’s racist past.
Party members and its minions continue to tie most issues to race because that tactic seems to have worked for gaining power. But when voters look at the basic facts, that claim begins to lose its strength.
For example, citing the voter ID issue as a racist Republican strategy simply bolsters the evidence that Republicans are, in fact, not racist. A majority [22] of black citizens and voters are in favor of the voter ID laws.
However, the Democrats continue to rail against voter ID laws because they know that those laws would impede voter fraud—a demonstrably proven staple in the machine [23] to elect Democrats to government.
Democrats have been attempting to whitewash their racist past for decades; to do so, they often fabricate history. For example, as a candidate for the presidency in 2000, Al Gore falsely stated [24] to the NAACP that his father, Al Gore, Sr., had lost his senate seat because he voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But Gore, Sr., voted against that act [25], as he supported and joined in the filibuster against that act. Gore, Sr. then sponsored an amendment [26] that would take the teeth out of the enforcement power of that bill, just in case it passed.
Did Dixiecrats Become Republicans?
Democrats also point to the rise of the Dixiecrats that supposedly shows racist Democrats becoming Republicans. However, only two major politicians who had been Dixiecrats switched to the Republican Party.
Fewer than 1% [27] of the more than 1500 Democrats-turned-Dixiecrats left the Democratic Party for the Republican Party. They were prompted to switch party allegiance primarily for economic reasons rather than racial animus.
As the Democratic Party began moving toward socialism, many former Democrats experienced disdain for that socialist impact on business and entrepreneurship.
Senator Strom Thurmond traded in his party alliance with the Democrats to join the Republicans in 1964—not because he continued to support racism, but because he began repudiating it.
Frances Rice [28] explains: “Thurmond was never in the Ku Klux Klan and, after he became a Republican, Thurmond defended blacks against lynching and the discriminatory poll taxes imposed on blacks by Democrats.”
Governor Mills E. Godwin, Jr. of Virginia [29] abandoned the Democrats for the Republican Party in 1974. But again, like Thurmond, Godwin simply abandoned his racist past. Godwin also served as Virginia governor first while a Democrat and then as a Republican.
Hypocrisy about Racist Past
West Virginia’s Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan Exalted Cyclops and long serving Democratic senator, did renounce his earlier support for segregation and racism. However, Byrd voted against confirmation to the Supreme Court of Justice Thurgood Marshall [30], a Democrat and the first black to be appointed to the high Court.
Byrd also joined 47 of his fellow Democratic senators as he voted against Justice Clarence Thomas [31], a Republican. Neither a black Democrat nor a black Republican could pass muster with the former Klansman.
Senator Christopher Dodd [32] praised Byrd highly by stating that Byrd would have been “a great senator for any moment.” To this potentially inflammatory remark, the Democrats remained silent.
Then later after Senator Trent Lott spoke kind words of Senator Strom Thurmond, the Democrats with their usual hypocrisy lambasted Lott unmercifully. It made no difference that Thurmond had never served as a member of the Ku Klux Klan while Byrd had risen to the high position of Exalted Cyclops.
Regarding Democrat hypocrisy, John Feehery [33] has remarked: “. . . Democrats are super-sizing their hypocrisy to levels never seen. It is their embrace of nihilism that is pushing them to these extremes.”
Policies Harmful to All Citizens
Undoubtedly, the majority of the members of the Democratic Party are not racists today. Yet, it remains unconscionable that so many Democrats label Republicans racists and bigots in pursuit of political power against their opponents.
Democrats cannot legitimately deny the many studies that offer support to the argument proffered by Republicans that Democratic policies are detrimental not only to black citizens but to all citizens.
The current theoretical philosophy of Democratic Party consists of seizing through taxation the financial rewards from “the rich” and giving those rewards to “the poor.” In practice, this Robin Hood scam ultimately means taking from those who earn and redistributing it to friends and allies of the redistributors. Such a system cannot possibly succeed. It can only create victims whose ability to produce becomes atrophied by the false promises of pandering politicians.
Democrats continue to play the race card because they have become utter failures at convincing the majority of the electorate that their policies work. Citizens have become dissatisfied with the actual theft of their earnings, as they have watched as shabby, crime filled cities are, in fact, the result of Democrat policy fecklessness and fraud.
Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution Thomas Sowell has pointed out repeatedly that the policies of Democrats have prevented the black population from rising out of poverty.
Many of the poorest cities in the USA have been run by Democrats for decades. According to Investor’s Business Daily,
When Democrats are in control, cities tend to go soft on crime, reward cronies with public funds, establish hostile business environments, heavily tax the most productive citizens and set up fat pensions for their union friends. Simply put, theirs is a Blue State blueprint for disaster. [34]
Surely, it is time that African Americans, women, and minorities adopt a different mind-set and realize, as Rev. Perryman avers, that the Democratic Party is interested only in their vote, not in their welfare. And, in fact, there seems to be a shift coming in the voting preferences of blacks and Hispanics.
According to Darvio Morrow [35], CEO of the FCB radio network, Democrats for decades have relied on the theory that as the USA grows less white, its voters will become more firmly entrenched as a Democratic Party voting block.
However, Morrow explains, “The problem with this theory is that it relied on the premise that minorities were going to remain solid Democrats. And that premise is turning out to be false.”
American politics is a complex machine, and the force of big lies remains strong. Whether the republic can remain in tact will depend on refuting those lies and in their place establishing a culture of truth, in which facts dominate and falsehoods are rejected.
Despite their fervent support for the Marxist movement touting “Black Lives Matter,” today’s Democrats, including the former occupier of the Oval Office, Joe Biden, [36] continue to support the abortion provider known as Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood is one of the greatest perpetrators of violence against African Americans in this country. It is founded on racism, perpetuates racism, and kills more than 850 African Americans every day. [37]
While blacks constitute roughly 13% of the USA population, they account for 36% of the abortions. Nearly 80% of all Planned Parenthood clinics are located near black neighborhoods [38]. Activists such as Candace Owens [39] and Kanye West [40] have labeled this set of circumstances genocide.
According to the educational website, blackgenocide.org, blacks are the only declining minority population in the USA, and “if the current trend continues, by 2038 the black vote will be insignificant.” Because abortion accounts for most deaths of black lives in the USA [41], those pandering for black votes might want to give that claim some serious thought.
Sources
[1] “Big Lie.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary.com. Accessed May 17, 2023.
The late Daniel L. Wright was the director of the Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, where he also served as professor of English from 1991 to 2013.
The following message is from the homepage of the SARC site, featuring the welcome and explanation of what the center was about:
Welcome to Concordia University in Portland, Oregon — home of the Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre (SARC). The SARC is an academic setting for annual gatherings that unite professors, teachers, students, playwrights, actors, directors and lovers of Shakespeare from all over the world to share research and insights into the Elizabethan world’s most acclaimed poet-playwright.
The primary goals of the SARC: (1) Determine who the Shakespeare writer was and (2) Explore why he wrote anonymously and pseudonymously.
That website also offers information regarding the numerous conferences held to discuss that authorship question.
My Gratitude to Dan Wright
From 1983 to 1991, Dan Wright and I were classmates and colleagues in the English department at Ball State University, where we both completed our PhD degrees; I completed mine in 1987 and Dan finished in 1990. We both benefited from the excellent guidance of Professor Thomas Thornburg, who directed our dissertations.
I owe Dan a debt of gratitude for the identification of the kind of interpretation that I engage in. As we attended Dr. Frances Rippy’s class in research, Dan’s response to one of my presentations offered the term “yogic interpretation,” a term I had not heard or even thought of until he said those words.
From then on, I have understood the kind of commentary, criticism, and other scholarly work I engage is indeed “yogic” in nature. I employed a “yogic interpretation” in my dissertation, “William Butler Yeats’ Transformations of Eastern Religious Concepts,” and I continue to engage that yogic concept as I comment on the poems of various poets, including Emily Dickinson, Edgar Lee Masters, the Shakespeare sonnets, and others.
Dan and I both had religion in common, even though those religious traditions are from very different perspectives: mine is from the union of original yoga and original Christianity as taught by Paramahansa Yogananda, and Dan’s was from the historical and theological tradition of Christianity as perceived through Lutheranism.
Dan’s religious training included a Master of Divinity degree from the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, from which he graduated in 1980. After his ordination in 1980, he entered the Navy and served for two years as a Navy Chaplain.
At Ball State during our sojourn to our advanced degrees, one would see Dan walking through in the hallways wearing his cleric collar because he remained an active churchman as he studied for his PhD in the English program.
I also owe Dan a debt of gratitude for alerting me to the issue of the Shakespeare authorship. During my research for information relating to Shakespeare, I happened upon Dan’s articles at the Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre (SARC).His brilliant analyses of and excellent clarity on the issue convinced me that Edward de Vere, 17 th Earl of Oxford, is in, indeed, the real “Shakespeare,” or is, at least, the best candidate offered to date.
Unfortunately, I never had the privilege of communicating my appreciation and gratitude to Dan for his fine scholarship. I would like to have let him know that his label of “yogic interpretation” has served as a bright light for my studies, and being introduced to the Shakespeare authorship controversy has further enhanced my literary studies.
Dan died on October 5, 2018, in Vancouver, Washington, of complications from diabetes. I wish soul rest for my former illustrious classmate/colleague, whose academic career has offered his many students a fine example in scholarship and the love of learning.
~Dedicated to the memory and poetry of Professor Thomas Thornburg~
Life Sketch of Thomas Thornburg
Born Thomas Ray Thornburg on September 23, 1937, to Robert and Dorothy (Hickey) Thornburg in Muncie, Indiana. Thomas was the third of five Thornburg children. His siblings include Rose, who died in infancy, Jerry, Danny, and Judith—all who preceded Thomas in death.
Thomas attended Muncie schools, including Southside High School, from which he graduated 1955. He completed his education by earning a doctorate at Ball State University in 1969.
Thornburg and Indianapolis native, Sharon Robey, married in 1961, producing four offspring: Donald, Eustacia, Amanda, and Myles. In 1985, Sharon died after a long illness. Thornburg then married Mary Patterson.
Thornburg spent his working life as an educator, teaching high school English at Yorktown and Pike High School in Indianapolis. He served as chairman of the English Department at Pike.
After completing the Ph.D. degree at Ball State, he joined the Ball State English Department faculty, where he served as professor until his 1998 retirement, after which he was awarded the status of Professor Emeritus at Ball State University
Thornburg’s Writing Life
A fine poet, Thomas Thornburg published the following collections of poems: Saturday Town (Dragon’s Teeth Press, 1976), Ancient Letters (The Barnwood Press, 1987), Munseetown (Two Magpies Press, 2001), and American Ballads: New and Selected Poems (AuthorHouse, 2009).
In addition to poetry, Thornburg authored two monographs at Ball State University: Prospero, The Magician-Artist: Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror” (Number 15, 1969) and Jonathan Swift and the Ciceronian Tradition (Number 28, 1980).
He also composed rhetorical analyses of the works of many writers, including Charles Darwin, Daniel Defoe, John Donne, Robert Frost, and Karl Shapiro. He published a novel titled Where Summer Strives (AuthorHouse, 2006), and for CliffsNotes, he did a work up of Plato’s Republic (2000).
Thornburg served as the lyricist for The Masque of Poesie, which was produced in 1977 on the Ball State University campus and also performed for the silver jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.
As a native of Muncie, Indiana, Thornburg once quipped, “I have traveled a good deal in Muncie”—echoing with his allusion, Henry David Thoreau’s, “I have traveled a good deal in Concord (MA).”
After his retirement from Ball State, Thornburg relocated from Muncie, Indiana, to Bozeman, Montana, where they resided with his wife until his passing on July 8, 2020.
Tribute to Professor Thomas Thornburg
I owe Professor Thornburg the debt of gratitude for instilling in me the seriousness of purpose required for the writing life. He served as my advisor at Ball State University (1984-87), providing invaluable guidance as I researched, analyzed, and composed “William Butler Yeats’ Transformations of Eastern Religious Concepts,” my dissertation for the Ph.D. degree in British, American, and World Literature.
As I sat for the professor’s course in classical rhetoric, I became captivated and delighted with the seriousness of purpose that drove the ancients to pursue fairness, precision, and truth in their discourse.
Also because of Professor Thornburg’s influence and example, I came to appreciate more deeply the value of pursuing accuracy, concision, and thoroughness in all written composition.
Anything worth writing is worth serious attention to honesty of purpose. Classical rhetoric has remained one of my favorite areas of interest as I pursue improving my skills as a writer.
Image: The Old Homestead by Ron W. G. The image is a painting by my sweet husband, Ron, who relied on a photo taken by my sister, Carlene Craig, who still lives there. The old homestead is the place where I grew up—a place of beauty that holds many memories of a young girl growing up in the turbulent times of the 50s and 60s.
Welcome to My Original Poems
My literary focus remains primarily on poetry and songwriting, but as a life-long creative writer, I have also dabbled in many other forms: short stories, flash fiction, memoir.
I also compose literary and expository essays, focusing on a variety of topics including history and politics—even some science/medical issues, especially those that remain controversial.
This room in my literary home provides links to my original poems.
Literary art—somewhat like science—is never truly settled or complete; thus I will be continuing to add—and even to revise— material from time to time.
As a poet, I take the art of poetry very seriously and thus I swear to the following oath:
As I, Linda Sue Grimes, engage in my career as a poet, I solemnly swear to remain faithful to the tenets of the following covenant to the best of my ability:
I will respect and study the significant artistic achievements of those poets who precede me, and I will humbly share my knowledge with those who seek my advice. I will dedicate myself to my craft using all my talent while avoiding those two evils of (1) effusiveness of self-indulgence and (2) pontification on degradation and nihilism.
I will remember that there is a science to poetry as well as an art, and that spirituality, peace, and love always eclipse metaphors and similes. I will not bring shame to my art by pretending to knowledge I do not have, and I will not cut off the legs of colleagues that I may appear taller.
I will respect readers and ever be aware that not all readers are as well-versed in literary matters as I am. I will not take advantage of their ignorance by writing nonsense and then pretending it is the reader’s fault for not understanding my disingenuity. Regardless of the level of fame and fortune I reach, I will remain humble and grateful, not arrogant nor condescending.
I will remember that poetry requires revision and close attention; it does not just pour out of me onto the page, as if opening a vein and letting it drip. Writing poetry requires thinking as well as feeling.
I will continue to educate myself in areas other than poetry so that I may know a fair amount about history, geography, science, math, philosophy, foreign language, religion, economics, sociology, politics, and other fields of endeavor that result in bodies of knowledge.
I will remember that I am no better than prose writers, songwriters, musicians, or politicians; all human beings deserve respect as well as scrutiny as they perform their unique duties, whether artist or artisan.
I will not rewrite English translations of those who have already successfully translated and pretend that I too am a translator. I will not translate any poem that I cannot read and comprehend in the original.
Linda's Literary Home 